Winniecat, I'm also in the south-west and my Charlottes have bad blight. The tops have mostly died off, but the potatoes are fine. Charlotte tubers don't seem to be affected by blight, although they won't grow any more now. I try to remove the blighted tops to stop it spreading to my tomgatoes (OK so far....) but I'm leaving the spuds in the ground until I need them.

Too hot and too dry, perhaps? We nearly lost one last year when we didn't water it enough in hot weather. It dropped most of its leaves in the middle of the summer, but it seems to have recovered well. I think ours will need repotting eventually - every year the pots are more root-filled, so they dry out more quickly and suffer in the heat.

Claire, your description sounds very like my potatoes. You're supposed to remove the blighted leaves and destroy them. I do find that with Charlotte, the potatoes themselves are unaffected even when the whole top.has died off, and they will stay fresh in the ground until you want them, although they won't grow any bigger.

But some other varieties of potato tuber seem to succumb to the blight, so maybe lift and store them, or eat them first?

Bordeaux Mixture may help to prevent blight from spreading but it won't get rid of blight that's already there. I have a feeling it's another of those things that's due to be phased out but there may still be some in garden centres etc.

My potatoes have severe (and very early!) blight. Although it's been dry for a couple of weeks, we had frequent rain and mild temperatures for some weeks before this, and there's no stopping the blight now. My plants never even got as far as flowering.

Happily, the spuds themselves are not affected (I always grow Charlotte for this characteristic) but the yields will not be as good as it should.

Just thought I'd share this with you: when I potted up my baby tomato plants, one of them snapped off near soil level. I pushed it down into the compost, but was running out of space in the mini-greenhouse, so I left the damaged one out on the ground in its pot. It's an outdoor variety (Maskotka) but this was only mid-April.

I took good care of the other tomatoes, putting bubble-wrap around them on cold nights. At the end of May I planted them out in the bed, and noticed that the "runt" was still alive. So I found a spot for it in another corner of the garden, just to see if it would survive. And guess what? It's now the bushiest and greenest of all my tomato plants.

So maybe we don't need to mollycoddle our plants so much. This one has been injured, left for dead and exposed to the elements since April, and it's thriving!

Has anyone else had an experience like that? -not personally! (left for dead, etc) - but with a supposedly tender plant that turns out to be a toughie?